Podcasts and screencasts are two great ways to deliver content to your students or have them create content. While they both use audio, they are different and can be used for different purposes. Podcasts only contain audio, whereas screencasts include an image, which is whatever appears on your computer screen, along with the audio. Therefore, if it is important for your listener to see what is happening on your computer screen, then a screencast would be a better choice to deliver information. Richardson (2010) notes that screencasts should be short; therefore, the length of time you need will also help you decide which tool is best for your purpose. Jing, a free software program for creating screencasts, limits them to five minutes. Podcasts are usually longer and have the added benefit of allowing you to subscribe to them through RSS feeds. If you have a lot to say, or plan to comment on a topic regularly, then a podcast might be the right choice. Podcasts can require more editing than a screencast and, therefore, more production time. In short, they are both great tools, but what you want to do with them will help you decide which one is the best to use. Ever since I heard about Radio Willow Web, I have wanted to try podcasting with my students. In fact, I had my class last year create a podcast of one of their book reports. However, this was not truly a podcast since we only did it once and there was no way to subscribe to it. However, I found the experience valuable and have been thinking of ways to incorporate podcasting into my classroom this year. One idea I have is to create podcasts of our fluency practice. To practice fluency, we repeatedly read poems, short stories, plays, and speeches. We usually practice for a couple of weeks and then present to the class. However, this year I would like to record our fluency and share it with our parents, principals, and anyone else interested. I think the students would be more invested in practicing and performing if they knew they had a real audience. I didn’t really know much about screencasting, but I felt it could be very beneficial to me as a teacher. Therefore, I decided to try my hand at creating one. I used the free software Jing to record my screencast: a tutorial on how to create a wiki. As Richardson (2010) suggested, I made a rough outline of the points I wanted to cover and the different screens I was going to use in the tutorial. I also found it helpful to do some things ahead of time, such as uploading images and creating the wiki, because those things took valuable time that I needed to spend explaining the tools. It took several attempts to create a screencast I was happy with. I found the time to be a factor and got cut off once for running past the five minutes. I also wasn’t happy with the audio quality, but I think that could be improved with a better microphone. Overall, the experience was fun and I think screencasts could be useful at my school. We do not have a lot of time for professional development, so I think this is one way to share new tools with teachers. This would allow teachers to watch the screencasts whenever it is convenient for them. I also like the idea of having students create screencasts, and I can see doing that with my class this year. One use I already have in mind is for our annual Grandparents’ Day. Every year I have my students create a short slideshow presentation telling everyone about their grandparents who are coming to visit our school that day. We use these as a way to introduce the grandparents to the class. Students could add narration to the slideshow using a screencast so the audio would be recorded in advance. I could also envision using screencasts with our unit on writing a process paragraph. Students could teach others how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or bake cupcakes using screencasts. They could draw pictures to illustrate the different steps in the process and then narrate for their listeners. If you are interested in learning how to create a screencast using one of the free web-based tools, there are many tutorials available to help. Here is one video tutorial from Tom Driscoll to show you how to do it using Screencast-o-matic.